Christopher Walken and Al Pacino go slumming in Stand Up Guys.

Europe is considerably kinder to its elder statesmen—at
least where cinema is concerned. Michael Haneke’s dissection of
octogenarian love, Amour, is a lock for the foreign-language Oscar, with Emmanuelle Riva, 85, up for her own golden boy.Middlebrow dramedy Quartet is winning audiences over with its story of retired musicians like Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon taking the stage.

What do we do with
our aging legends? We repurpose their well-worn personas. On the rare
occasion, it works, highlighted last year by Robot & Frank,
which cleverly cast Frank Langella as an elderly thief with dementia who
used his automated butler to abet him in cat burglary. When it doesn’t
work, we get Stand Up Guys, an insipid, horribly unfunny film
that showed up 10 years too late to the Tarantino-aping party and casts
some of the greatest actors of the past 30 years in a horribly lazy and
tonally schizophrenic crime comedy.

You’re always in trouble when a film about dudes over 60 goes for the Viagra. Stand Up Guys
reaches for it immediately when just-released convict Val (Al Pacino)
is taken by his best friend, Doc (Christopher Walken), to a brothel,
only to find his pipes aren’t working. So the two immediately break into
a drug store, where Walken stocks up on his old-people medicine while
Pacino pops a handful of “boner pills” and then spends the next 20
minutes talking about the “python in his pants” that’s “hard as
Gibraltar.”

Somehow,
it gets worse from there. The setup is as old as screenwriting
classes—Walken’s been tasked by a mob boss to whack a knowing Pacino
before sunrise, so this is their last hurrah—but just getting Walken and
Pacino in a room together is rife with potential. In the rare quiet
moment when the two masters of cadence (Pacino the gruff motormouth,
Walken the…well, the Walken) exchange dialogue, the film shows
potential. But Stand Up Guys jackknifes in tone more frequently
than Walken himself. In one scene, they’re sitting in a diner talking
about the “good old days.” The next, they’re twinned pistol-wielding
badasses doling out vigilante justice. They talk about the woes of aging
right before one character “ruins” a hooker for all other men (her
words) with his gigantic schlong. Then they talk some more about being
old.

It’s inconceivable
how director Fisher Stevens—best known for his accidentally racist turn
as an Indian scientist in the 1986 robot-with-feelings gem, Short Circuit—could
have amassed such a cast with a script seemingly assembled from a stack
of film-school scripts with a chain saw. Even the great Alan Arkin, who
shows up briefly as the pair’s former getaway driver, can’t bring life
to some of the most shallowly written gangsters since The Boondock Saints, a film Stand Up Guys also begins to echo in its strained final act.

Stand Up Guys
is a sad film. Not in its content, per se, since it’s a comedy. It’s
tragic in its ability to take a great actor like Pacino and further his
descent into caricature. Pacino has been a craggy Muppet version of
himself for years, but even at his worst (88 Minutes or Righteous Kill,
anyone?) he’s still got some of that manic energy that defined a
generation of actors. Walken fares much better, but mainly because you
could watch Walken do his taxes and still be delighted every time he
speaks. But these actors deserve better than this forced garbage that
never reaches below the surface and therefore never achieves anything
except a rambling sense of shiftlessness. Maybe it’s time Pacino gets a
room at that nice retirement home we call Europe, where bad men like
Fisher Stevens can’t steal their medicine and gals like Emmanuelle Riva
might want a look at that python.